On the Coffee Flavored Brandy Cantos

This poem was written in the university library on a monday. It was written as a reflection on the work of the previous night: a series of 30 automatic poems written by Greg Bem and I while watching a few documentaries on Pound in preparation for a presentation he had to give sometime during the week. We kept ourselves awake with minor doses of amphetamines and the drink du moin: Allen's Coffee Flavored Brandy. Like Bem, it's a Maine staple. I think I was re-reading the marriage of heaven and hell at the time. Maybe I had just got my haircut beacuse I disinctly remember the final allusion having a profound effect on me. Greg might still have a copy. Mine is in North Carolina on my other laptop.

We wrote in the dim
wood-punched basement
while shafts of TV din
flashed a lecture by Hugh Kenner

our cantos
completely escaped
the pharmacidal sanity
twelve times unclean
as the last, tattered alphabet
stanazed a broken, black pearl

a siren pulsed like breathing

upstairs was sick with
coffee flavored brandy
it stuck to me
like a candle to the sunrise

between the black and white spiders
composing the base, contagious air